A Week's Worth: A roundup of economic and business briefs

The Dow tops 13,000; women quick to spend their tax returns

ByRobert KilbornApril 30, 2007

• On better-than-expected profit statements by 3M, Boeing, General Electric, IBM, and other blue-chippers, the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 13,000 for the first time last Tuesday and was still in that rarefied environment as the week ended. The new milestone was arrived at 128 trading days after the index crossed the 12,000 threshold – a span that, according to the Bloomberg.com financial reporting service, was almost 15 times faster than it took to go from 11,000 to 12,000.

• Care to guess who spends their federal tax refunds fastest? According to results of a new survey by credit card issuer Visa USA, it's women between 18 and 49, only 30 percent of whom say their refund checks will go into savings accounts. Forty-eight percent of women and 45 percent of men over 50 said they planned to save theirs.

• 20-somethings are the most willing of all groups of Americans to pay more for a product if its design is appealing, a study for software developer Autodesk Inc. has found. That extends from new cars all the way down to video games, respondents said.